Friday Book Review: Alan Spencer’s The Body Cartel
The dedication in The Body Cartel, the first novel from University of Missouri-Kansas City English grad and Overland Park writer Alan Spencer, probably explains a lot: “This book is dedicated to my parents, who allowed me as a child to watch horror movies as long as I didn’t have nightmares.”
Being a fan of creature features isn’t easy because, more than any other genre, the catalog is littered with dreck. Scary movies are probably harder to pull off than any other genre, partly because the plots are inherently ridiculous and because the audience knows to watch for the trick. (Best-selling horror author Stephen King once wrote that at some point you have to reveal the monster and hope you’ve done your job so well that nobody notices the zipper running up the back of his rubber suit.)
Because of all this, to be a true horror fan is to search for all those hidden gems that make it worthwhile. It requires developing a certain appreciation for the tropes and traditions of all those bad movies. Otherwise, why bother?
The Body Cartel reads like the work of someone who has absorbed a lot of those bad movies and has developed his own appreciation for cheese as a survival instinct.
